Hyderabad Employs 200,000 IT Workers

  It was in mid 1990s, the Andhra Pradesh government suddenly went into an introspection mode. The mission was to find out the reasons for not many IT companies willing to set up their offices in the state and they were all queuing in Bangalore for office space. The findings after a thorough research were interesting. The non-availability of human resource was one of the key reasons for companies not moving to Hyderabad despite the government willing to allot land either free or at nominal cost apart from various other incentives like concessions in power tariff. The power that be in the state government realized that the neighbouring state had several private engineering colleges and students from Andhra Pradesh too moving to the state for pursuing their engineering and finding an IT job in Bangalore. The migration of students coupled with the engineering pass-outs from Karnataka itself helped the state attract IT majors to Bangalore to set up their facilities. This helped the garden city get the distinction of being the Silicon Valley of India.
The Andhra Pradesh government too quickly moved in that direction and opened the gates for private engineering colleges and took several bold decisions to open up the state for a sort of education revolution. The information technology boom took shape in Hyderabad in 1999-2000 with the setting up an exclusive 146-acre Hitec City. The government's move was timed at making the HR readily available to the companies willing to explore the opportunities in Hitec City. And it worked. Today, the state has over 300 popular engineering colleges offering a wide range of courses including MCA. This boom in engineering education has encouraged IT and ITeS companies to shift their facilities to Hyderabad and today it estimated that the total number of companies operating in IT and ITeS space would be about 1,200 including the small and medium companies. About 2 lakh people depend directly on this sector in Hyderabad alone while the indirect employment would be about eight lakh.